Why are we paying £3.9bn for 5,000 nannying civil servants to patronise us?

We're spending countless millions on fuelling health professionals’ missionary zeal, with nothing to show for it

Comment

By Damian Thompson

6th March 2018, 11:05 pm

Updated: 7th March 2018, 2:23 am

YOU must have noticed what has happened to Britain’s chocolate bars over the past couple of years. They’ve been on a diet.

Some are now so svelte you can barely recognise them.

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Britain's continuous nannying of the public racks up a whopping £3.9bn a year

The Yorkie bar, for example. Once weighing in at 70g, this “chunky milk chocolate” has now shrunk to 45g. Chunky? I call that worryingly thin.

Worrying, that is, if you’re bothered about value for money — because, you’ll not be surprised to learn, the price hasn’t shrunk in proportion to the chocolate.

If, like me, you’re annoyed about that, you’ll have been infuriated by this week’s news.

Coming soon to a food outlet near you . . . artfully shrunken and calorie-reduced pizzas, burgers and ready meals, brought to you by Public Health England — the people who nagged choc makers into miniaturising their products.

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Previously the Yorkie bar had a net weight of 70g, but regulations have forced the standard Yorkie bar down to 45g

But hang on, you may say. Just as smaller bars mean less sugar and fat, so reducing “fattening ingredients” and portion sizes by 20 per cent must surely be a good thing.

After all, no one disputes that, as a nation, we eat an unhealthy diet. The medical evidence is mounting all the time.

But there’s something wrong with this reasoning, and you don’t have to work in a lab to spot it — just look around you.

For years we have been filling our supermarket trollies with products whose labels are plastered with smug claims about how they are helping you meet your “five a day” target of fruit and veg.

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'After all, no one disputes that, as a nation, we eat an unhealthy diet. The medical evidence is mounting all the time.'

But have the people behind those trollies been getting slimmer? Not that I’ve noticed.

Many of the customers at my local Sainsbury’s look as if they’d be happier being pushed around on wheels themselves, to avoid getting out of breath as they waddle round the aisles.

The facts aren’t in dispute. Two out of three adults are overweight. Even more alarmingly, so are a third of children.

Back in the 1970s, I was known as a fat kid.

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In the UK two out of three adults are overweight, despite the nanny-state constantly trying to inform our eating choices

I took a lot of stick for it — and not just at school. I dreaded beach holidays because my father would crack jokes about the Thompsons’ pet whale.

In fact, I was only mildly chubby. Today, no one would even notice my little spare tyre.

Public Health England — an agency set up by the Department of Health in 2013 — isn’t wrong to point out the bad eating habits of children and parents.

It may even be right to claim that if Britons stuck to the reduced helpings and healthier recipes it is forcing on manufacturers, 35,000 lives could be saved over the next 25 years.

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'Public Health England — an agency set up by the Department of Health in 2013 — isn’t wrong to point out the bad eating habits of children and parents'

But those lives won’t be saved, for the simple reason that tinkering with portions and taxpayer-funded nagging doesn’t work.

PHE and its quangocrat predecessors have been wagging their fingers at us for at least 30 years, during which it’s not only waistlines that have swollen.

So has the cost of running a giant health quango.

How many “public health professionals” do you think PHE has? As many as a thousand? Try multiplying that by five.

That’s right, Public Health England has 5,000 full-time staff. Add in their equivalents in the rest of the UK and we’re looking at a huge drain on the public purse.

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Public Health England currently has a staff of over 5000 employees, costing millions to the taxpayer

In 2015/16 it received funding of around £3.9billion, and this figure is expected to have risen to more than £4billion in the past two years.

And what do we get for that? Not just food monitoring. There was advice from PHE’s Dr Thomas Waite during a 2016 heatwave to “open windows at night” — which he followed in the recent icy spell with a recommendation to “stay warm”.

Then there were instructions to old folk to wear shoes “with a good grip”, lest they slip, and stern warnings against staying up late checking emails.

Meanwhile, the real solutions to our health crisis are staring us in the face — and it’s not about cutting calories. In fact, surprisingly, we now eat far less in calorific terms than previous generations.

'PURE EVIL'

crash crisis

World War Two rations were designed to give civilians 3,000 calories a day.

In 1974, when stodgy cooked breakfasts were the norm and obesity was rare, a study found the average Brit ate only 2,534 calories a day, excluding eating out.

By 2012, even with eating out now included, this had fallen to 2,192 calories.

It is the collapse in exercise, and the fact we now drive everywhere rather than walk, that must be behind our growing waistlines — children’s included.

Student eats 150 bananas and 14lbs of spinach a week as part of raw vegan diet

Schools should educate them about the dangers of stuffing their faces, instead of filling their heads with nonsense about “gender identity”.

But don’t expect much help from PHE. Its preachy, middle-class executives are horrified that teachers might let slip the word “obese” in front of grossly overweight kids. Talk about “healthier weight status”, says Nanny.

But that’s all it is — talk. We are spending countless millions on fuelling health professionals’ missionary zeal, with nothing to show for it.

It’s enough to make you want a Yorkie bar — a proper, humongous one of the sort we enjoyed when Britons were actually slimmer.